Pussy Riot post new anti-Putin Olympics video from Sochi

SOCHI: Russian punk group Pussy Riot on Thursday posted a new video filmed in the center of Olympics host Sochi, savaging President Vladimir Putin over the hosting of the Winter Games and the rights climate in Russia.

The video, titled “Putin will teach you how to love the motherland,” is the first music project by Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina since they were released from prison colonies last year.

The pair have been in Sochi along with other Pussy Riot supporters all week. They were detained by police for several hours on Tuesday and beaten in scuffles on Wednesday which saw them roughly handled and whipped by Cossacks.

The video opens with the Pussy Riot members clad in their trademark colored balaclavas, tights and one piece dresses swimming in the sea off Sochi.

They are then seen singing and dancing in front of the Olympic rings in the center of Sochi and then trying to taunt a giant Olympic mascot, a furry snow leopard.

The video also shows Wednesday’s footage of the girls being beaten with whips and roughly beaten in scuffles with Cossacks, who perform the role of vigilantes in southern Russia.

The Russian-language and highly colloquial lyrics slam the human rights situation in Russia, referencing the activists who are still jailed over a Moscow anti-Putin protest in 2012 and the jailed Sochi environmental campaigner Yevgeny Vitishko.

“They will teach you in the prison camps how to cry and how to obey/Salute to the bosses, and hi, il Duce,” the song goes.

“The constitution is lynched, Vitishko’s in prison/Stability, prison gruel, the fence and the watchtower.

“Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.”

Tolokonnikova posted the link to the video on her Twitter @tolokno, promoting it as the “premiere”.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were sent to penal colonies on a two-year hooliganism sentence for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.

However, they were freed early on amnesty in December last year.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) warned the young women on Wednesday that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to stage actions outside the Olympic venues.

However central Sochi is some 30 kilometers north of the main Olympic Park.